Aug 24, 2008 9:06 am US/Eastern
CBS 2 At The Met: J.M.W. Turner
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
It's the first time in nearly four decades that so many paintings by British artist J.M.W. Turner have been seen together in the United States. At the Met, visitors will see gallery after gallery of Turner's take on seascapes, historical subjects and scenes from his imagination. Born in 1775, he began as a watercolorist and a draftsman.
Met Curator Gary Tinterow tells CBS 2's Dana Tyler that Turner didn't shy from tragedy as in "The Shipwreck," pulling us in with light paint colors to the sailors clinging to life in a turbulent sea. Tinterow said, "He wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you. The highest aspiration that an artist can achieve would be to shake the viewer through the sublime, which is to say to frighten you, to scare you, to elicit a visceral response."
After his death in 1851, Britain's Tate Gallery was given the most comprehensive Turner collection in the world. More than half of the 140 oil paintings and watercolors in this Met exhibition is on loan from the Tate. Turner was the most important British artist of the 19th century without question, and his work exerted enormous influence, for example, on American 19th century landscape paintings.
In "The Field of Waterloo," Turner is recording an historic event. always a patriot, he sides with the British after being defeated by the French. Tinterow points out the artist's humanistic point of view. "He's saying, the battle is over, we've won, but look what's left, look at the wreckage, the human wreckage. So this painting really asks the question by showing the wounded in the foreground and the destruction of the castle in the background. He's asking you to consider was this worth this effort."
Tinterow continues, "And he doesn't even specify in their uniforms so we don't know how to react. Who's winning here? We don't know. We know that in a sense humanity has won because there may be peace, and that's what that brilliant salvo of light is about. It's peace and rest coming after this tremendous event."
One of Turner's most famous paintings is "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons". He was there with many other Londoners along the Thames in 1834 witnessing the event. In this exhibition visitors will see nearly a dozen watercolors showing how Turner worked with color as he prepared to make the final oil painting.
"Almost like a cinematographer showing minute by minute the destruction of the palace but also the effect of the flames in the night sky, the reflection on the Thames, and we know that he changed the direction of the wind from the reality so as to make a better picture," Tinterow explains.
Turner's style became increasingly abstract. He chose topical subjects, like a whalehunt but was criticized for painting a seascape in yellows and whites.
Tinterow said, "Turner himself was an odd fellow. His fellow painters thought of him being an odd duck, uncouth. We know that he was rather learned. He was interested in poetry at the time, reading Byron, Coleridge, and others of his contemporaries, but he seemed to have had almost a lonely life. There were two important women, his mother was very close to him. He was a bit of a curmudgeon from what we understand, in terms of his biography, but everyone recognized that he was a genius. He was perhaps the last of the old master painters."
You can see the Turner exhibition at the Met now through September 21st.
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